Thursday, April 20, 2017

No, no, no, I’m not talking about leprechauns, I’m talking
about human between the ages of 2 and 17. I’m very specific about the age group
since a market research company called NPD Group recently determined that 91%
of that age group plays some sort of video game regularly. I find that
statistic amazing, and sad, mostly because I can’t imagine being that age and wanting
to inside on my computer for hours and hours and hours when I could be swimming
in the ocean, or exploring a forest, or watching bees pollinate flowers
instead.

I had an interest in the natural world when very young that
was not only encouraged, it was nurtured. I found and devoured John and Mildred
Teal’s book,“Life and Death of
the Salt Marsh’, and boom, my mother hired the high school biology teacher Mr. Minardi, to take myself and a few
other nature minded kids through our local salt marshes for a few weekends of
exploration and in-situ learning. Oh and previously I’d had my own nature
tutor, Barbara Hale, who had taken me to the Creeks while Ossorio still owned
it, and to various other places where wild things still lived so I could get up
close and personal with the natural world. I was lucky.

Of course, when I was a kid, there were only about 4
television stations to choose to escape in front of (even less for the years
when we lived in London) and the only other options were books and the
outdoors. Both habits, reading and interacting with nature, stuck and while
I’ve been known to lose myself in a book for the day, or deep into the night,
I’ve always got some sort of outside activity going. I’ve done it all. I’ve
collected seashells and butterflies, used potatoes to make art prints, looked
at snowflakes under a microscope, raised bees in a Plexiglas hive take lived in
the living room (my mom hooked me up with that as well, she was awesome) and
made tie dye with shredded beet juice. I’ve been a birder, a tree climber, a
gardener, a naturalist and a flower lover as long as I can remember.Bugs don’t freak me out, the ocean
doesn’t scare me and I like getting dirty.

I have a bunch of these
little people in my life now, and none of them are all that excited to join me
in the outdoor world, and that freaks me out. I think (and studies suggest)
that kids are happier when they breathe fresh air, that running in the woods or
fields provides easy exercise and climbing trees improves balance. Lugging branches
and brush to build a fort makes you stronger and just making up things to keep
yourself occupied when told to “go outside and play” fosters creativity,
teaches problem solving, and gives you confidence.

I believe that my
generation, most of whom are the parents that are raising these kids, know this
in their hearts. They too grew up like I did, without any really electronic
stimuli, and yes, of course it’s very seductive to spend hours getting down a YouTube
spiral or binge watching an entire season of a TV show in one sitting, but we
have to do better. So I’m challenging all the adults I know to find a little
person and drag him out into the fresh air.

To help I thought I’d give
you a list of suggestions of things you could try to entice them with. I don’t
think everything will work for everybody, but it might trigger your own brain
to some of the things you did when you were a kid and you lost hours totally
engrossed in something that wasn’t a screen.

Go fishing. Build a fort.
Whether it’s in on the beach, under a bush, or up a tree, there is nothing like
making a place that is your own and where you get to tell your parents not to
enter. See how many pink rocks you can find in one day. Make art ala Adam Goldsworthy
using pine needles to sew autumn yellow leaves together. Try balancing stones
on top of each other to see how high a stack you can make. Do not use glue! Get
a microscope and check out stuff you find outside on it. Pond water, dog
salvia, snowflakes (this was super cool, but requires serious cold weather gear
and really good gloves.

Collect tadpoles, put them
in a large glass jar (we’re talking restaurant sized mayonnaise containers) or
a fish tank with a bunch of the water from the pond you found them in. Watch
themtransform into frogsin the kitchen. Don’t forget to pay
attention to them everyday or they will hatch and you’ll have to gather up
hundred of tiny frogs from every corner of the room - even behind the spice
jars – I speak from experience here. Feed the tadpole lettuce or flake fish
food. We used hamburger, but it was not the right thing to do. Release them
back into the same pond area where you found them.

Collect black rocks with
white stripes. Figure out what leaf would be the best hat and wear it for the
entire afternoon. Drag a futon onto the back porch, turn off all the lights and
count shooting stars, or learn the constellations. See how many different
colors of green you can find by gathering as many green living things as you
can (leaves, grass, moss) and put them all out on a large sheet of white poster
board. Do the same with brown or pink or purple. Take a photo so you can
remember. Build drip castles with a bucket of water and sand.

Pick a whole bunch of
berries, blueberries, blackberries or anything else that stains your fingers
when you squish it. Take a tee shirt and boil it in a pot of 8 cups of water
and ½ a cup of salt. Wring the tee shirt out but leave it damp. Put your
berries in a pot with at least an equal amount of water and boil them for two
hours with a lid on the pot. The longer they boil the darker the dye. Make tiny
pigtails of the tee shirt using rubber bands or string.Let your boiled berries coil and remove
them with a strainer. Put the wet tee shirt into the pot and simmer for a
little while. Turn off heat and let it cool down.Remove from the pot and rinse with cold water until water
runs clear. Take off rubber bands. Hang outside to dry. Wear gloves or have tie
dyed fingers too. Play in the rain, jump into puddles. Don’t worry about
staying dry and instead revel in being wet. Encourage nature photography. Use
your cell phone and then use an app to publish them so they can be cherished
and shared in person. Give your kid his own flower or vegetable patch to grow
what ever they want. Use a whiskey barrel and potting soil so you won’t have to
battle the weeds!

Create rock art. Collect a
pile of rocks, decide on a certain size or shape or color and gather as many of
them as you can. Then grab a bunch of newspapers and some nontoxic paint and
paintbrushes and go crazy. Give them swirls, dots, stripes or into creatures.
Give them each three or five or seven eyes. Put up a bird feeder and count how
many different kinds of birds you see. Keep a list. Get an identification book.
Ditto with butterflies, but instead of a feeder, plant a butterfly bush. Plant a
serpentine of sunflower seeds. There is almost no chance of failure with
sunflower seeds as long as they have soil, sun and water. Identify which
flowers would make good dresses if you suddenly shrunk to the size of a honeybee
and were invited to a ball. Collect interesting driftwood that looks like
animals and create a zoo, or that resemble buildings and construct a city. On a
windy day tie a magic marker on a string to a branch and holding a piece of
paper under it, let the wind draw you a portrait of the day. Hook up an
old-fashioned oscillating sprinkler and jump through it. Start a nature journal
keeping track of everything interesting you see every time you step outside.

Take photographs of any
animal or bird footprints you find and see if you can identify them. Take a
ball ofcolored bamboo yarn
outside and wrap it around a branch of a tree. Wrap it tightly with the yarn
touching itself to make a solid band. Add a second color, and a third. Do the
whole tree. Learn how to tell the sex of a worm (this is a trick, most worms
are hermaphrodites, but they still need another worm to create offspring.) Start
some seeds in empty eggshells. Fly a kite, better yet make your own kite and
fly it instead. Learn the difference between a frog and a toad and see if you
can spot both on the same day. Make your own mud with a hose and make mud pies.
Big ones! Make snow angels in the sand. Make sand castles in the snow. Get a
sunprinting kit and make cyanotypes using the sun and found object.

Collect fall leaves and
place between two sheets of wax paper. Put old tee shirts or paper towels both
under and on top of the paper and iron until the wax paper fuses. Let dry and place
in front of your window. Make a
saladincluding weeds and edible
flowers. Use purslane, dandelion leaves, violet flowers and leaves, some garlic
mustard and throw in a few chopped up daylily flowers for color. Buy a
magnifying glass and stare at a flower and then everything else you come
across. Marvel at leaves that have hairs on them the metallic looking powder on
butterfly wings. Dry what you see. See if your flower is a single flower or if
it’s a composite flower – one made of lots of tiny flowers. Think marigolds or
asters. Learn how to skip flat stones. Go for a hike. Search for spider webs
after the rain or when they are diamonded with dew. Make wind chimes from
shells you find on the beach. Make herb infused vinegar, or basil butter, or
freeze mint leaves in ice cubes to throw into iced tea.

Count fireflies. Create a scavenger hunt and find as many
things as you can that start with the letter B, or that have red on them, or
that have stripes or dots. Go on a paint chip walk. Grab some free paint strips
in colors you think are either hard or easy to find in nature and then take a
walk outside and see if you can find exact matches. Make a dandelion chain. Make
a wreath out of bittersweet branches in the fall, or out of wild grape vines in
the spring. Build warriors out of found sticks and carve them heads out of
peeled and cored apples. Dip the carved heads in lemon juice (I cup) + salt
(1tsp) for a minute and then mount them on their stick bodies and set them out
in a warm dry spot for a couple of days. Watch as the faces shrink and warp to
create fabulous alien beings. Have a battle. Make snowball with a squirt of
food coloring in them and leave them out in the sun on top of thick white rag
paper. When the snowball is melted, bring the paper inside and let it dry.
Frame the result.

I could go on, but I think you have enough her to get
started, and besides, it’s time for me to go outside and take my daily “what’s
in bloom” photo walk.

Paige Patterson’s is going to enlist her nephews to help her
make rosemary smudge sticks to battle insects with this summer.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

I try to not use the “h” word as I think the negativity it
connotes is pretty heavy and I’m really more of a lover than a hater. However
when it comes to this one specific plant, I’m a card carrying, big time, hater. Have you heard me rant about Lesser
Celadine yet? If you work with me any time in the spring when this evil little
plant is in flower, you’ve certainly heard me go off on a mad, crazed spiel
about how hideously invasive and horrifyingly difficult to eradicate this plant
truly is. I’ve been battling (Lesser Celadine or Ficaria verna, formerly Ranunculus ficaria) for
three years now and I’m losing. Big time.

The plant is actually sort of pretty when you first come
across it. It’s in bloom right now with a big, beautiful, buttercup yellow
flower and glossy dark green leaves that make you understand how someone could
decide to dig it up and bring it to this country as an ornamental. It thrives
in full shade to full shade, can deal with all sorts of soil moisture levels and
fertility and doesn’t really care what kind of soil it’s growing in. It’s low
growing and makes a pretty weed smothering mat of yellow that makes everything
look sort of cheerful and yummy when you’re feeling a little tired of waiting
for spring. Plus it’s a spring ephemeral, which means it does it’s entire life
cycle in a super compressed period of time and goes dormant by mid-June, just
in time for the rest of the garden to show itself off.

Unfortunately, this lovely group of characteristics, all
combined in one plant, makes it an impossible thug. And because someone
brought it here and it’s not native, its got no natural predators or controls.
If it were a native, there would be an insect, fungus, animal, bird, disease,
or a bacteria that would have evolved with it and therefore would be able to
keep it in check, but because it’s so far from home, it’s escaped all it’s fatal
foes. Nothing eats it. Nothing infects it. Nothing bothers it. Not
even me.

There are two suggested means of control -- both of which
have failed for me in no uncertain terms -- herbicide and manual removal. Did I
mention that I’m trying to be more organic? So herbicide is rarely something I chose,
but last year I blocked out a previous bad experience and broke down and bought
something toxic to try and control this stupid thug. What happened instead, is
that in the process of spraying the invasive’s leaves with my vicious chemical,
invariably some dripped off and went into the soil, where it traumatized and once
again, almost killed my collection of magnolias, magnolias being more susceptible
than any of my other trees to herbicide damage. I knew this would probably
happen; 15 years ago, when my lawn people put down a pelletized broad leaf weed
killer in the back forty of my property to try and control another vicious
little invader, Creeping Charlie, they instead sent every magnolia I had into
shock. All the other trees were fine, but it took the magnolias three years to
recover. You would think I’d remember something as traumatic as that, but
Lesser Celadine makes me crazy.

The other way to eliminate this pest is to remove it by
hand. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, insert laughing like a lunatic here. It’s just that
the plant can be pulled up by hand or dug up, but each plant has these tiny
little tubers attached to its roots and if you leave even one (and they
separate from the plant super easily) the plant comes back with a vengeance.
Try and dug it out before it sets seed too, as those spread around like germs
on a communal spoon.

Did I mention that I believe I got this weed by using
compost from the dump? And that the folks that sometimes help me out weeded it
a bunch of it up and threw it into my compost pile as well? Thus making it
totally unusable as I can’t get it up to cooking speed? When it’s in bloom, I’m
blinded to everything else. I see people working in their yard as I drive past
and I stop the car to point out their own personal Lesser Celadine and give
them tips on removal. I just can’t help myself. I’m digging it myself, but it’s
slow go and I not that sure I’m even making a dent.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of my system I need to balance
out all my loathing by telling you about a plant I just adore. The Itoh peony
(otherwise known as an intersectional peony) is a cross between a tree peony
and an herbaceous peony and has the best of both their parent plants genes.
Like a tree peony they have enormous silky petal flowers, but where a tree
peony has only a few blooms and if you cut them off you are removing years of
growth of the tree, the itoh peony likes being cut. They have all the blooming
power of the classic, traditional peony, with tons and tons of blooms, the
numbers of which increase each year. However, where the regular peony will flop
over and drag itself on the ground with even the slightest hint of rain, the
itoh’s stems are much stronger.

Vigorous, disease resistant and easy to care for with gorgeous,
enormous flowers. A plant you treat just like a perennial and cut back to the
ground, which comes back bigger and stronger and covered with more flowers
every year and is deer resistant. What’s not to love about all that? Yes, they
are expensive, but they make a huge impact and so treating yourself to at least
one a year is something even the most frugal garden out there will understand. I
already got mine this year. It’s divine, but I will confess that I have my eyes
on at least one more.

Paige Patterson also needs to add a bunch of gaura ‘Whirling
Butterflies’ to her garden this year… just because.